A Lack of AAA Games for PSVR?

There’s less than 30 days to go before PlayStation releases their VR to the public, but many people continue to raise questions as to how many titles the platform will include. According to Digital Spy, Sony had previously pledged that over 50 titles would be offered for gamers to play on the VR by the end of this year. However, prospective player’s concerns about the lack of AAA games for the VR have continued to surround the launch of the VR, so president of Sony’s Worldwide Studios for Sony Interactive Entertainment, Shuhei Yoshida, has responded to these concerns, hoping to reassure gamers of Sony’s commitment to having numerous titles for the new platform.

At the Tokyo Game Show this past weekend, Yoshida told Digital Spy that developers and publishers aren’t releasing entire games for the VR yet. For big name games, they are only releasing a small fraction of a game.
He goes on to state that

"For it to make sense for those publishers, it’s probably the right strategy for them to create small experiences so that the developers are able to experiment with using the VR tech and take advantage of the very high quality assets they have already created, and be able to put their fans and players inside their gaming world. It doesn’t make sense, even to me, for them to create full blown titles right now – or even next year – when we are starting with an install base of zero."

However, Yoshida reminds gamers that although entire games for big titles aren’t going to be out for the VR, those that are coming out look amazing:

"If you’ve tried the Star Wars Battlefront VR experience, it’s absolutely amazing, it’s one of the best VR titles on the platform. I was surprised because I was anticipating the large publishers to take time to come onto PSVR because the market doesn’t exist and they don’t have to rush into it – unless some of the developers they publish are super excited to work on VR like Ubisofts’ teams."

PlayStation has been working to release games like Star Wars Battlefront, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Final Fantasy XV and also Batman’s Arkham franchise to the PS VR. But Yoshida isn’t satisfied with only bringing big hit names to the VR, he also admits to have been trying to get Sony’s own first party studios to work on smaller projects so that they can bring innovative new games to the VR market as soon as possible. Yet for those who also claim that the VR was only made for smaller gaming experiences. He cited the upcoming Resident Evil 7 by Capcom as an example that large scale games are not only a viable proposition, but the entire game is also playable on the VR. He admits that when visiting the team behind the E3 demo, he realized that

"They are really serious about making a great game in VR. The E3 demo was just an early example, they have made a lot of progress since then, and when you play the new demo for TGS, it’s super scary and much more comfortable. They have implemented many tricks to make it more comfortable to play. So I’m now confident that they can really hit that goal of making the full game playable on both the conventional TV and PSVR."

He goes on to say

"For developers, it’s super-fun to create experiences in VR. It’s like hitting a goldmine – everywhere we dig, there’s gold! So instead of spending three years or so like we do to develop regular games now, because it’s so easy and so quick to find something really exciting using VR technology, I’ve been encouraging all of our teams to try many different ideas. To find something amazing and quickly create a small package, because if we don’t, someone else will – and once they do it’s no longer a new discovery."